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Kamala Harris and the Legacy of Neville Chamberlain
Talking to a documentary filmmaker many years after World War II, Malcolm MacDonald discussed his days as Britain’s colonial secretary during the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments as the Nazi menace was growing.
It was he who presided at cabinet level over the abandonment of Britain’s promise to allow the development of a Jewish homeland, a place where Jews could find a home in a world that regularly gave itself over to persecution and hate.
There could have been no worse time to abandon the Jews. The Baldwin and Chamberlain governments looked on helplessly as Hitler broke every treaty holding back Germany’s war machine, ultimately allowing the carving up of Czechoslovakia, hoping that that would civilize Hitler. By March of 1939, it was clear that it had only whetted his appetite and war was on the horizon. By then, it was clear that the Jews of central Europe and beyond were facing an anti-civilizational threat like none they had every seen, and many frantically were trying to escape the disaster that impended.
It was precisely at that time, when the need for safe haven for Jews was greatest, that Britain announced that it was only going to admit a few thousand more Jews to the Holy Land, and afterwards, not a single one more. Thus, as doom approached, there was almost nowhere to escape, as Britain itself, the United States, and all the countries that joined in the Evian refugee conference of that time, indicated that they could only take precious few immigrants.
The filmmaker asked MacDonald about why the government had made that choice, which in the end doomed millions to torture, enslavement, and death. MacDonald was at least honest in his answer. He said that Britain realized by May 1939 that it would be fighting for its very existence in another immense war. In its Middle East mandate, it had two choices only: it could please the Arabs or it could please the Jews. The Arabs with whom MacDonald negotiated would accept no compromise; the Jews would and did accept even the smallest territory of the Holy Land in a partition plan, as had been proposed shortly before by Britain’s Peel Commission, but the Arab High Commission would not agree to that at all.
So, MacDonald said, horrible as it is in hindsight, we made a calculation: the Arabs had a choice of aligning with us or with Germany; the Jews had no choice at all — they would remain loyal to Britain in any event. Not exactly true in the end, as Britain’s unfaithfulness spurred the revolt of the Irgun and Lehi movements, but they only represented a tiny minority of the Jews in the Holy Land and abroad at that time.
Kamala Harris’ pointed absence from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress must be seen in a similar light — and that’s if we give her every benefit of the doubt. As president of the Senate, one of her few Constitutional duties as vice President, she should have been sitting behind the prime minister as he spoke, as she did when Ukraine’s president spoke by congressional invitation just a little while ago.
But she has made the cold calculation that she will lose very few Jewish votes by her studied insult to the head of Israel’s government, and she would have alienated the crowds we saw in violent demonstration outside the Capitol, whose votes she is courting.
Yes, a large and growing contingent of Democrats have joined her — even the Senate’s president pro tempore, whose sole duty is to sub for the Veep as the Senate’s president, was a deliberate no-show. Though their party regularly calls their political opponents Nazis and racists, they show no more compunction than Neville Chamberlain in trying to cozy up to the real anti-civilizationalists, the barbarians who are not just at our doors, but whom the Border Czarina made sure could easily enter our gates and organize and carry on their hatred everywhere they want in our country.
Jews are slow to change loyalties. Democrats listened to their needs when they arrive in large numbers more than a century ago, and Republicans then were the ones who cut off further immigration from eastern Europe. Jews are slow to forget that; as well, the tremendous commitment of Jews to charity, organized as it was traditionally by the community’s authorities, and a matter of law as well as charity, inclined Jews towards establishing a comprehensive social life net.
Yet the American Jewish community has been severely shaken by the ferocious reemergence of antisemitism as a political force in the United States. It is as yet unclear as to how much that will translate into Republican votes.
But if Harris thinks that no one is watching or caring and that the Jews, like other identity groups that the Dems imagine are their clients, will never stray from Maggie’s farm — she may be surprised come November. In this way, Jews are like Tolkien’s hobbits — it takes a lot to rile them, but once facing a real enemy and aware of it — watch out.
Harris has thrown her lot in with the barbarians and hopes to ride the Hamas tide. It fits with her ahistorical worldview, which she seems to believe, that we should unburden ourselves of yesterday, as if that would free us of all worries, rather than deliver us to utter incoherence and national psychosis.
That is the choice Harris is kind enough to outline. On the one hand, Netanyahu sets out a vision of the Middle East united against the atavistic hatred and terror of Iran and all its clients, a vision that Trump empowered with his sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.
And on the other, a candidate so averse to the moral duty of any civilized person, let alone the leader of a mighty nation, to know and learn from history that she is following the footsteps of those who empowered the greatest breakdown of civilization ever, the Chamberlain appeasers, who sped up Hitler’s rise and made the ovens of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor possible.
By publicly choosing the Hamas over America’s historical commitment to Israel, Harris has made a grave error, enough to the sorry truth of her candidacy through all the mighty media puffery.
Hold her to account. The American people are good. They shed their blood to extinguish Nazism. Clearly define the truth of what Harris has chosen and Americans will not be indifferent. They are not callous. They will not let hatred win.
The post Kamala Harris and the Legacy of Neville Chamberlain appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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